I encountered a problem with Virtual Center (VC, vCenter) 2.5 Update 4 where trying to change from the evaluation license to a proper license server resulted in a message that there were “Not enough licenses for this operation”.

There were various suggestions on the web, mostly involving stopping and starting the Virtual Center and License Server services. None of them worked. The only other suggestion was to remove all the hosts from the Virtual Center, add the license, then re-add the hosts back in. This would lose any nice filing of VMs in the “Virtual Machines & Templates” view, and would generally be a bit of a pain.

As a last resort, I thought I’d have a Google round for possible registry settings which may affect licensing.

Looking in the registry of my VC server there was no “LicensePath” key, so I created one, stopped and restart the Virtual Center service and found that VC now found the license server correctly and didn’t complain about “Not enough licenses”.

So to recap, open regedit, navigate toHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\VMware, Inc.\VMware VirtualCenter

Create a new String key calledLicensePath and enter the info for your license server, e.g. 27000@vc01.example.com